Right, I think being a national media reporter would be tough. To know enough and spend enough time on all 30 teams is just not feasible. They just aren’t going to spend the time it would take to see if the suns moves were actually smart. They were confusing on the surface, even many of us here were confused by them at first. Those people who gave us F’s just never bothered to look past the surface.ShelC wrote: ↑Wed Dec 11, 2019 8:53 amBut that's literally their job to know players, teams and the league. Getting Rubio and thinking he'd help a young team with no point guard and no leadership wasn't even that farfetched. Rozier and DAR would've cost more, been higher risk with maybe lower reward IMO but we would've been lauded for signing either. And maybe it was just guys going for a "hot take" or a "haha stupid, inept Suns" angle but Rubio was never a joke of a player and this might be the perfect roster/situation he's been in. Just seemed like because we've been trash for 10 years meant that Rubio was a dumb signing and wouldn't work out. Nothing to do with basketball.
I spent a some time trying to explain to a few non suns fans what the suns were doing this off season. I think the drastic shift from McD’s tenure of hoarding young unproven players to JJ’s tenure of adding actual useful nba players confused people. In the surface, you look at a team and go, they’re bad, they should tank. We’ve been programmed to think that tanking is the only way to build a better team.
I think most people underrated our “good” players as well. Booker has always been widely underrated by national people because the suns don’t win games. People don’t care who else is on your team past your top few guys, so they don’t really notice when half your rotation should be playing in the g-league. They don’t put the blame on those guys, instead they say, well Booker and Ayton must not be that good if they can’t win 20 games.
Basically, it just takes some time and effort to see why the suns off season made sense and why it led to what we have seen so far this season. Many of us figured it out, but we’re the suckers who stuck with this team the last decade, of course we’re going to put in the time to figure it out. It’s not surprising that many in the national media didn’t.